Archives for posts with tag: politics
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Quasi-Defense of the Social Being: Control of the Discourse

Mar 5, 2022 //
2

Social media discourse is a lightning rod for political alignment. The right sees it as an opportunity for radicalization while simultaneously decrying it as “woke” cancel culture where conservative voices are marginalized and red-lined. So far as I can tell, the left doesn’t actually have a coherent opinion on it; some celebrate cancel culture as establishing consequences for anti-social behaviour, much in the same way a dinner guest would be asked to leave if they loudly called another guest a racial slur. Others prefer to see a democratization of social media processes so that we could collectively agree on what the rules are rather than allow corporate moderators or the mob to determine dinner party etiquette. What I’m interested in today is the centrist position: where those corporate moderators are wildly celebrated for their autocratic role in sifting out acceptable discourse.

If only the companies that profit from polarization would do a better job of stamping out polarizing content!

Let’s let the company that profits off of polarization manage the stamping out of polarizing content!

There is, of course, reason to be concerned with the content of social media discourse. The coup in Myanmar is widely held to be somewhat to blame on social media. The rise of right-wing populist movements like Trumpism in America, Brexit in the UK, and Modi‘s government in India are linked to social media disinformation campaigns. Reasonable people agree: the echo chambers of increasing extremism must be stopped. The methods of doing so are obviously up for debate: solutions ranging from a socialist revolution against social media corporations to the libertarian hellscape where we all cackle with glee as the social media inferno engulfs our world. As always, the reasonable centrist sees the solution somewhere in the middle: get those corporations to ban and lockdown the uncouth!

Despite me wanting to write this for a long time, contemporary examples have manifested themselves for me. Facebook has blocked Russian state media on its platform in light of their unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and reversed some of its previous decisions by unblocking praise for the neo-Nazi Azov military battalion – if you’re very specific in praising them for their resistance against said Russians. This is a brilliant move by Facebook because empowering far-right revolutionaries against a Russian invasion worked so well in Afghanistan! I’m not saying such censorship is right or wrong; my point is that there is legitimate criticism to be made of how the discourse is being managed, and this decision was made unilaterally by a corporation with a pretty shifty track record.

Ukraine officially incorporated this overtly Nazi militia into its military after the Russians annexed Crimea. I'm not saying invading Ukraine was an appropriate way to "de-Nazi" the country, but they clearly have some work to do with their own far right elements. Nuance!

Ukraine officially incorporated this overtly Nazi militia into its military after Russia annexed Crimea. I’m not saying invading Ukraine was an appropriate way to “de-Nazi” the country, but they clearly have some work to do with their own far right elements. Nuance!

There will always be political positions you disagree with, even find abhorrent. But allowing some emperor to dictate what is allowable discourse in a particular space is just as absurd as the coffeehouse bans enforced by the Ottomans and by Charles II hoping to rein in political dissent and “false news”. But that is the demand! WhatsApp needs to regulate the discourse on its App because right now it’s too secret! Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg need to personally review every single post to make sure that reading it won’t summon Sadako out of our phone screens in seven days. To dominate the bogeyman, we need a powerful ally, and there are none more powerful than the social media overlords.

This is bad. The right cries about social media censorship all the time, and… they’re not wrong! It’s tempting to say that it doesn’t count as censorship if the government isn’t doing it, and the irony is certainly amusing when otherwise pro-business ideologues are hurt and betrayed by business decisions against their personal interest, because, to be clear, these are businesses looking out for their bottom line. They’re not “woke“; they’re capitalists. They are making decisions based on what will make them the most money, and overt hate speech isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. But corporations are quickly becoming our new feudal lords, so their iron fist restricting the online commons is just as much a cause for alarm as any government cracking down on dissent. What makes money may shift over time if far right populism continue to grow in popularity!

The next Tickle Me Elmo to sweep the nation!

The next Tickle Me Elmo to sweep the nation!

Long time readers will know I’m not a free speech advocate. There is plenty of speech that is counter-intuitive to dialogue, but restricting spaces for speech is different than applying appropriate codes of conduct that lead to the most productive dialogical output. Cracking down on the the coffeehouses isn’t the solution. If we’re looking for solutions, it’s important to know what the actual problem is. The problem isn’t idiots who are too stupid to critically digest controversial opinions so they need to be protected from dangerous ideas, it’s zealotry. Social media has become a space for what amount to digital cults to flourish. I think cults are an important symbol for what’s happening because with cults, the people aren’t stupid, they just want to belong.

A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies of U.S. President Donald Trump and President Barack Obama

If you think that the photo on the left has more people in it than the one on the right, you probably believe that more people voted for Trump than for Biden in the 2020 election. What’s one more alternative fact? It’s not that Trumpists can’t count, it’s that believing Trump’s lies has been imbued into their communal identity. Saying the photo on the right has more people is not a factual refutation, it becomes an ad hominem attack.

The difference between a community and a cult is an ability to question sources, whether the ideology is seen as a fundamental value and a part of who you are versus a passion or interest, and the amount of exposure a member has to the world outside of that group. It is perfectly within the realm of possibility to maintain a social media presence and adhere to the right side of that balance. Most people do it, and there is actually evidence that greater internet use is not completely driving modern political polarization. When social media cults do appear though, are they any different than cults in the analog world?

If we see the discourse problem of social media as potential breeding grounds for cults, then trying to overpower them through force is more likely to lead to Waco-style consequences rather than cross-partisan healing. If they’re cults, then they need de-programming solutions. Far-right social media enclaves are like toxic relationships, and a sense of belonging is obtained from hazing-style abuse. A lot of the reason the right is so angry despite not actually having any real political demands is because they’re constantly being told that the world hates them and thinks they’re stupid. That’s gas-lighting 101, but it sure works to keep recruits dependent. That’s why “basket of deplorables” caught on as a rallying cry for Trumpists because it vindicated the narrative of spiteful isolation that the radicalization process inured. Remember when Steve Bannon was telling a crowd to embrace being called a racist as a badge of honour? The worse the behaviour, the more isolated you are from the rest of society, the more embedded into the fold of the far right you become. Anything telling you otherwise is fake news.

Bear with me

Bear with me

As a quick aside, despite frequent “both sides” rhetoric from usually right-wing speakers, the issue of polarization is a right-wing issue. The left has been basically the same for like, over a hundred years, and even spine-chilling philosophies like defunding the police have been around since 1974. Traditional conservatives today are being defenestrated from their own parties because they’re not bootlicking fascism hard enough. Today’s right-wing is off the political spectrum. Please note my distinction between conservatives and the right-wing, as conservatives are basically today’s centrists that I’m castigating for wanting social media elites to regulate our social sphere. To be clear, cultist tendencies can and do arise on the left, but the specific issue of polarization is emphatically a right-wing issue and the increasing extremity of right-wing cults is the alarm bell I’m reacting to.

Anyway, back to it!

The solution to cults isn’t to barricade them out of their bunkers to scurry to another dark corner, it’s to open the world up to them. Give them a broader community to belong to. This is where my apologism for social media ends, because their algorithms sow divisiveness to ensure cults can never connect to ideologies outside of their own. Taiwan released a social media platform where the algorithm linked people through commonality rather than outrage, and it led to genuine solutions to otherwise intransigent problems. Immerse in hobbies or volunteer activities where there is exposure to other people different from oneself! Follow a variety of news outlets with different bents at their source, and don’t rely on social media to determine what you are presented with! When diverse groups of people connect, it pulls us out of our zealotry.

Newsies

If Christian Bale isn’t personally delivering you your news, you’re probably being radicalized.

Whether social media pulls us into a cult or not, it’s easy to agree that the current manifestation of how we engage on the internet is broken. It doesn’t have to be this way. Spaces to communicate dissent are necessary; society is far from perfect and there are powerful interests hoping to keep it that way. Spaces to disagree don’t have to be toxic or held hostage by disinformation.

Social media corporations profit by engagement, and it’s easy to get rich off passionate emotions. It’s not the platforms, it’s the platform owners. Capitalists have turned communities into cults because that’s the most efficient way to get a return on their capital. I don’t want capitalists fixated on profits to solve polarization because their solution will always be what profits them the most.

If we want a better social media, we need to determine and hold accountable the processes that produce our social media feeds. My guess is most people would agree to a methodology that fosters connection over divisiveness, that encourages people to disconnect from the digital rather than continuously pull “engagement”, so maybe people should be the ones who say how our public sphere is managed. I guess I’m one of those lefties who advocates for a socialist democratization of social media platforms. Who could have guessed!

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism

Afghanistan: The Pointless War

Oct 9, 2021 //
5

The war in Afghanistan began with the oppressive, theocratic Taliban in power, and ended with the oppressive, theocratic Taliban in power. Sisyphus rolled his Katamari Damacy boulder up the mountain, and it rolled right back down again. The absurdity of the war is obvious on its face, but there is a desperation to find meaning within it that would make Camus blush. Though it’s somewhat old news by now, during the American withdrawal, there was all sorts of noise about how Western forces were abandoning their Afghan comrades to the brutality of the Taliban.

I am not trying to diminish the severity of what the Taliban has done and will continue to do with those dissenting under its rule. My glibness comes as a result of the crocodile tears shed over the bodies of those slain during the withdrawal from the war that ignore the over a hundred thousand bodies that accumulated preceding it. Losing a war is bloody; that’s the reality of war. If you don’t like it, maybe question the war itself rather than the means of its end.

The realities of war

The tears come from the bipartisan desire to create meaning in a pointless war: if there are good Afghans to save, it means that the war produced good Afghans worth saving. Nobody would have given a shit about them otherwise; the West would be much more inclined toward taking refugees if there was a heartfelt belief that we need to create a safe haven for those fleeing violence and persecution. The sad irony is that those whose freedom from the Taliban was being demanded were those who had aligned themselves with the invaders, cementing the linking of a “good” Afghan with their complicity in the war.

Another central tenet that the war in Afghanistan was meaningful is the women’s liberation that the war provided. Some women were able to go to school, and therefore 20 years of death, torture, and war crimes are vindicated. Those women are worse off now than they were before; again, no argument, but finding miniscule acts of success to justify what is otherwise 20 years of pointless war is incredibly ignorant. In actuality, using war to generate feminism is more likely to produce a nation of incels who see feminism as cancer than an Islamic Feminine Mystique.

Thanks, Betty Friedan!

Using feminism as justification for the war in Afghanistan, and gesturing loosely toward the mostly urban women who benefited, pointedly ignores the majority of women who live in rural settings where most of the war took place. Afghan women were certainly not benefitting from the war when they and their families were dying from it. The quick rise of the Taliban points to a nation hungry for incel-logic; Afghanistan may actually be worse off than it was 20 years ago from the perspective of democratic and liberal reformation due to the brutality used allegedly in its name. Sisyphus’s boulder fell back down the mountain and into a ravine. The West tried to viciously impose liberal secularism in Iran with the Shah, and he too was violently overthrown by a virulently religious fundamentalist group. Any positive regard held for Western ideals is just as dead as all the rest of them.

The war made Afghanistan worse, and for what? The bipartisan narrative adopted in much of the media paints the picture of a blundering but ultimately benevolent force trying so hard to do good but occasionally failing in simple but horrific ways. Like if Rocky Balboa knocked out Apollo Creed in the first round, but because his eyes were all bruised up and he couldn’t see, he wandered into the crowd and begun striking civilians at random. At home we’re watching and thinking, no! Rocky! If only Mickey had cut you so you could see! We are helpless as Rocky bludgeons old women and children in his missteps. Then, after the crowd boos too loudly for too long, we lament Rocky leaving, shaking our heads at the blows he receives on his way out the door. Meanwhile, Apollo Creed has gotten up and dusted himself off, and being the only one left standing in the ring, claims victory.

YO AMERICAAAAAAAA!

We could still love Rocky after such a blunder. It’s forgivable. But that’s not how war works. The better analogy would be if Rocky was at a bus stop where Apollo Creed was reading a newspaper, and Rocky was like, “I heard you hate women!” and then pulled out a gun and shot him. Then he wandered away from the bus stop to a nearby wedding reception and shot up the guests. And he did so with eyes wide open.

The West knew what was going on in Afghanistan. They’re actively preventing themselves from being held accountable to international law. We’ve had whistleblowers point out the war’s criminality to us repeatedly and they’re all being punished for it by both American political parties. And for what? For what? For literally no reason. Terrorism didn’t go away; Al-Qaeda evolved into ISIS-K. Afghanistan is fully red pilled. America wanted war instead of justice, the rest of the West went along with it, and this is what we’re left with.

Cartoons make the villains easy to spot!

I’ve purposefully avoided talking about the military-industrial complex and how the reason for the war is obviously all the money that was made by the defense contractors and weapons manufacturers. It’s not that I disagree, it’s that we don’t have a smoking gun pointing to that level of Machiavellianism, and I want to be as convincing as possible. The war is provably pointless in a way that ought to make us reflect on why it ever happened in the first place. When there is no justification for a war, it’s a lot easier to compare it to straight-up murder. The war in Afghanistan was criminal. Those who participated in it are criminals. Anyone saying otherwise is covering up a crime.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism, Uncategorized

Political Propaganda: The Importance of Storytelling

May 22, 2021 //
7

The maxim that “the personal is political” has been around since its origin in the 1960s feminist movement. It postulates that what happens in one’s personal and private life is actually quite relevant to and influenced by the larger, structural factors at play on a macro scale. But really, everything is political. Mezzo level institutions and organizations are political. Media is political. Neutrality is political. Everything is interconnected, and what happens anywhere is going to be shaped by, and will shape in its own discrete way, the world and its ideology.

When it comes to film and television, the same holds true. In general terms, action and horror films are inherently conservative. I appreciate a wide diversity exists across all genres, and some great films are great because they subvert common tropes, but by and large, action and horror films are inherently conservative. There is some threat to the in-group from an outside force, and the only difference between the two is whether the protagonist goes on the offensive or the defensive. Action films are usually a bit more broad in that the threat is typically to upset the status quo (think of the Joker who wants to change the world, and Batman who wants it to stay the same – Batman’s ‘solution’ to the world’s problems is ultimately to remove all the deviants). Or you can think of Captain America: Civil War which is one long advertisement for libertarianism (don’t let oversight committees hold me accountable; I, as an individual, know best). Horror films are more personal in that the threat is much more intimate. The threat is more overwhelming and overpowering. The viscera is embellished. But the overarching theme between the two is clear: the Other is dangerous, and you better fight or the bogeyman will get you. Think about it this way, conservative politicians and pundits use horror movie rhetoric to justify action movie policies.

They may seem like us, but there is just enough of a difference that their inhumanity is truly revealed

In contrast, adventure films are inherently progressive. The protagonist leaves their comfort zone, goes on their hero’s journey, and learns something from having experienced the different. Consider the original trilogy of Star Wars which would be incredibly problematic by today’s standards of identity politics: every human is white except for the one black guy who is pretty shady. Yet by the end of the story, Luke has found friends, teachers, and allies across a wide range of species with different languages, cultures, and lifestyles. The final confrontation is an overcoming of hatred, and the humanity of the antagonist is very literally revealed when Darth Vader connects with his son in his dying moments. It isn’t an outsider that is the villain of Star Wars, it’s hatred. It’s an ideology that can be overcome through non-violent resistance – Luke wins by refusing to fight.

The politics of a thing doesn’t have to be overt. It can be baked into the structure of the way a story is told. A character can have an exploratory relationship with the different, or it can be a threat. Protagonists in stories are paragons of how to interact with the world, and the way that the storytellers frame that interaction will inherently be political one way or another. Even the really obvious political messages like in Civil War don’t seem obvious because it is the framework of the story shaping the message rather than a character yelling at you that libertarianism is amazing. Though the beard Steve Rogers grows afterward may be telling…

Sharks, the Thanoses (Thanii?) of the sea, being shown here in a radical propaganda film that tells us that even those maligned as unthinkingly violent can be our friends… if we leave our comfort zone

Superficial politics is what is commonly associated with politics in movies today. Movies that base their entire marketing campaign on how much of a woman their protagonist is, or ensure that a minor character is Asian, or show a brief allusion to the existence of homosexuality in the corner of their film: these are what instigate the great political debates of our time.

When a film goes to great lengths to include every identity, it feels hollow. Films are finite, which means they have only so much time for character development, and peppering the screen with diverse, one-line characters is far more tokenistic than it is a genuine political statement. Even a television series doesn’t have enough time to invest in all the colours of the rainbow. Representation is important in films, but tokenism is not representation. Better to have less representation than just a rich tapestry of background characters, and then produce greater depth.

There is just… boy! There is just one of every kind of you, isn’t there?

I’ve written previously about feminist ethics in ‘feminist’ films. In this case I want to look at the politics. Replacing the male lead of an action film with a female doesn’t change the inherently conservative nature of the format. This likely contributes to the intense backlash that these types of films receive from white men: they are no longer presented as the in-group, which means they must be part of the out-group, which means they are closer to the one-dimensionally monstrous villains than to the heroine saving her own status quo. When Captain Marvel destroys the patriarchy with her laser fists, she isn’t creating a new, brighter future because the world she is saving belongs only to the in-group of the comfortable female watching the film from home. The world isn’t actually changed in any meaningful way, it just doesn’t have Jude Law in it anymore. The dynamic of the out-group threat remains the same; it is simply the content that is shifting. Here the narrative is exulting my elimination, and it doesn’t feel all that great. Hence, backlash.

Jonathan Haidt paints purity as an inherently conservative virtue, and I agree that it is, but it exists within progressive circles as well. When the left cancels itself on Twitter because someone isn’t being the perfect incarnation of allyship, that is the same manifestation of out-group exclusion found in any conservative diatribe. Framing old, white men as the dastardly fiends to be destroyed by a quick-witted teenage white girl and her motley crew of minority friends and LGBT acronyms is a shallow political message of identity and a deeper presentation of group categorization. The categories may be new and turn traditional categorization on its head, but the process remains the same.

A girl!? Inventing things!? Harumph and such!

Superficial politics in media will never change anyone’s mind because it isn’t intending to. It’s probably encouraging further divisiveness because conservative ideology is inherently divisive. Its intentions are to make money. Is it such a shock that billion dollar corporations aren’t actually as progressive as they pretend to be? Controversy breeds money, and enough people buy into shallow political pandering to turn a profit because they’re thrilled to be a part of an in-group for once, and their political education has come from triple-digit character count polemics on social media. Plus it pisses off the alt-right, and therefore it must be good! This kind of film will continue to be made so long as this continues to be the state of our world. If Fox News really wanted to end this manufactured culture war, they’d just stop ranting about it, and it would probably go away. I guess they have their own ratings to consider.

The thing is, though, more people probably learned how to open up to the outside world and fight against fascism from Star Wars than they did from the Ghostbusters remake. Ideology has a place in film, but it needs good storytelling to be effective. The right complains about Hollywood’s conversion to ‘woke’ culture, but progressive ideals have always found their home in fiction. The issue is panderous, bad writing and tired conservative tropes dressed up in progressive clothing that are alienating to the new out-group.

My political activism involves liking movies with really rabid comment sections on their YouTube trailers

I like action movies. Batman is my favourite superhero, and I thought Civil War was better than Infinity War. I dislike horror movies for the most part, but not for the reasons listed here. You can enjoy things and ignore the politics within them, but that doesn’t mean that the politics aren’t there. Those who don’t recognize them are going to be much more susceptible, and that sounds ominous, but it goes both ways. Maybe people will learn to be kind to strangers if they saw it in a movie once? There is a difference between good politics and bad politics, despite what those evil, relativistic postmodernists think!! Good politics represented as preachy and tokenistic only reinforces bad politics. Good politics embedded in a good story will go infinitely further.

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Categories Art, Politics
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